Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Public Pasts

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which the disciplines of history and archaeology in South Africa relate and how they have negotiated the public as part of their disciplinary practices of producing knowledge about the past that is accessible. It presents an analysis of questions of knowledge and power, and the different ways that scholars working broadly as ‘historians’ or ‘archaeologists’ have viewed the relationship between expertise and ‘community’. It is also about how relations of expertise have been negotiated within and across these fields, and particularly how those relations of expertise have been contested. This is done through an analysis of the varied social history research and efforts at popularisation of the History Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, as well as the forms of public engagement on the part of public archaeologists in the District Six Museum and in Khoisan rock art research. The article also analyses the District Six Museum in Cape Town as a space of emerging expertise in the field of public history, whose practice and experience demonstrates the possibilities and limits of transcending relations of knowledge characterised by a politics of paternalism and atonement, in which public scholarship is limited to relations of outreach. The article is concerned to understand the possibilities of decentring and relocating expertise outside the academy.

Keywords:

• The production of history
• social history
• public archaeology
• public history
• atonement
• outreach
• orality
• museumness
• knowledge transactions
• museum as forum

Notes

See, for example, the distinction drawn between Nate Shaw and Kas Maine, and All God's Dangers and The Seed is Mine in the review article by Colin Bundy (1997:367–8).

This argument is developed in Ciraj Rassool (2000) as well as in Hamilton, Dlamini, Witz and Rassool (2002).

See http://web.uct.ac.za/epts/archaeology/index.html (accessed 23 March 2006) for information about work done by the Research Unit on the Archaeology of Cape Town (RESUNACT) with schools at an excavation site in Tennant Street, District Six as well as about work done with schools more generally.

Elsewhere, of course, Hall has argued for the intellectual terrain and cultural practice of ‘social archaeology’, see Hall (2000).

There is haunting footage of the removal of the Abrahams family in Lindy Wilson's film, Last Supper in Horstley Street.

Strong criticism of the museum had been presented that in spite of its non-racial intentions, the effect of the Streets exhibition was to privilege the experience of coloureds in the history of removals. This was among the issues debated in the Digging Deeper workshops conducted in 2001–2. See Houston (2002); see also the critical discussion of ‘Nomvuyo's Room’ by former District Six Museum collections coordinator, Haajirah Esau (2002). ‘Nomvuyo's Room’, of course, was based on descriptions of life in District Six in Ngcelwane (1998).

The simultaneous possibilities and limits of public archaeology's modes of empowerment are also apparent in other archaeological projects in the Western Cape, such as the Living Landscapes Project in Clanwilliam. See for example Parkington (1999). See also UCT (n.d.:25).

Members of the District Six Museum have, for instance, taken exception to the implication that the District Six Museum was really little more than a creation by academics, who had ‘played a major role’ in setting it up, having ‘partly organised’ the conference in 1988 out of which ‘the Museum grew’, and who had made these contributions out of a spirit of university service and outreach, see UCT n.d.:25.

There are Bleek-Lloyd exhibitions at the Iziko South African Museum (in the form of an exhibition on rock art, ‘!Qe: The Power of Rock Art’, which opened in December 2003) and at the new Museum van de Caab at the Solms-Delta estate in Franschhoek, as well as at the new Origins Centre in Johannesburg, whose first and founding section is the South African Museum of Rock Art (SAMORA). This last was formed partly out of the work of the Rock Art Research Institute (formerly ‘Unit’) at Wits, which was headed by David Lewis-Williams until his retirement a few years ago. One of the most recent temporary exhibitions focused on the drawings made by the /Xam at the Bleek/Lloyd household was ‘The moon as shoe – drawings of the San’ curated by Miklos Szalay of the Zurich Ethnological Museum and held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 2003. An accompanying book by the same name was published in Zurich by Scheidegger & Spies in 2002.

Janette Deacon was one of the organisers of the landmark international conference on the Bleek-Lloyd collection held at UCT in 1991 from which Voices from the Past was produced.

Pippa Skotnes presented a similar understanding of the ‘series of relationships’ between the European scholars and the /Xam individuals who had a ‘common aim’ to ‘preserve the memories of cultures and traditions which were fatally threatened’ (1996b:23). Elsewhere (Skotnes 2001) she referred to the ‘folklore that was created through a unique collaboration between settler and native’. In the exhibition, Miscast, this relationship was counterposed with colonialism's savage violence.

Third Meeting of the International Advisory Committee of the ‘Memory of the World’ Programme, Tashkent, 29 September to 1 October 1997, www.unesco.org/webworld/memory/committee_tashkent_report.doc (accessed 15 November 2006). See also the nomination form for the Bleek-Lloyd collection at http://www.unesco.org/webworld/nominations/en/south_africa/southafr.htm, accessed 15 November 2006.

See especially Hamilton, Harris, Taylor, Pickover, Reid and Saleh (2002).

See Weintroub (2006) and Bank (2006) for recent exceptions to this trend.